Christianity
Bultmann on the Judaism of Jesus
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 01 May 2002
Bultmann
Professor Rudolf Bultmann of Marburg is a notable Christian scholar who established “form criticism” as a way of understanding the New Testament documents. He also wrote a well known essay called The New Testament and Mythology which Christians of a different kind from Bultmann reject along with their own brains as the work of Satan. In another notable book, Primitive Christianity in its Contemporary Setting (1956), Bultmann tried to do what most Baptists and Fundamentalists would also consider as Satanic—to put Christianity into the real world in which it developed, not a fantasy world of saintly rabbinic apostles, but one in which the Jewish and Greek cultures were in conflict, sectarianism was rife and Gnosticism was to be a major influence and a rival of Christianity.
Unlike the dishonest evangelicals of today, Bultmann had no doubt that social phenomena were influenced by the society in which they arose, and considered it almost axiomatic that Christianity was influenced by Hellenism from the outset. Since the Judaism from which it branched was itself already influenced by Hellenism, it is hardly surprising, though many modern Christians, wanting to see God acting linearly through the history of the Jews alone, for fear of admitting any Pagan influence on their fetish, deny any contemporary influences on Christianity except some idealized form of Judaism.
Bultmann not only accepts the influence of Paganism but, unlike the puerile view of most Christians that Paganism was only an excuse for sexual orgies, Bultmann recognized Paganism as itself immensely complex. Within the milieu of Judaism, Hellenistic Magic and Eastern Mysteries, Christianity arose as a movement which accepted certain outlooks as basic while being critical of others, and in addressing questions which other religions inevitably were addressing at the same time, found itself in rivalry with those that also gave answers to these questions.
Bultmann is clear that Christianity was not an inevitable consequence of contemporary events, and that scholars had to study these contemporary phenomena objectively to seek what Christianity had in common with its rivals, if its differences from them were to be appreciated. Bultmann saw with the utmost clarity that Christian scholars had no business trying to prove that Christianity was true, or that it was a natural pinnacle of religious understanding through its superiority over other religions. Christian theologians, not Christian historians had that job. The historians had to describe what they had discovered to clarify the issues, and seek to understand human existence through history, and show its relevance to the present situation.
Historians present evidence as honestly as possible, and try to show how the people of the time saw things. Rarely will that be how modern people see them, especially in religion, but modern people will make up their own mind what they believe whether it is based on an earnest attempt to understand what happened, or on some deep seated emotional need. The outcomes rarely coincide.
Creation
Bultmann rejects the idea that the Jewish scriptures have any pseudo-scientific speculation about the origin of the cosmos. The first chapters of Genesis depict God as the Creator to show that the universe is His, not to explain it. The idea of a creation by an act of God is itself another act of faith. Believers in God will believe in Creation because it justifies their belief in God acting in the world. Life is owed to God in this faith, and humanity therefore owes God obedience. It follows that those who try to uphold Creation as scientific,
- are being stupid, and,
- are trying to justify their faith, the opposite of the intention.
Nor was there only one god. Bultmann points out what is obvious to everyone except the average Christian from a reading of the scriptures—different people had their own gods which the scriptures did not deny but treated as irrelevant to the Jews whose own god was Yehouah! Though Bultmann did not realize it, the Persians conditioned the Jews to think of Jehouah as a universal god, and this universalism shines through many of the prophetic writings, but when Judaea became an independent country under the Maccabees, Yehouah was proclaimed the Jewish natiuonal god—the universal god still but also the special god of the people he had chosen. These people called Him “Lord,” just as other people in the Ancient near East called their god, “Lord.” Each of these people had a “Lord” who was exclusively their own. And for each of them, their own “Lord” was the “one true god.”
The Persian God was transcendent before the Jewish one, but he had also created all that was good and therefore harmonious—what the Greeks called the cosmos. The Greek mind saw the harmony as important and realized that what was harmonious could be worked out and understood. The Jews had no interest in the harmony of God’s creation, only the awe of it. God was awesome. The prime meaning of “awe” is “fear!”
Both “harmony” and “awe” are natural phenomena. They are aspects of Nature. A god creating and controlling Nature is an unnecessary male construct, a male vanity preserved only by male propaganda, possible because males exclusively controlled patriarchal religions.
In fact, the Jewish concept of God eschewed any rationality in God’s Creation, emphasizing only its awe. The reason was that the Persians imposed the Jewish notion of God because they wanted their subject people to be intimidated. The Greeks, however, although they took their cues from the Persian cosmogony, did it independently, free to develop their ideas as they wished. This struggle between freedom and coercion has been central to western religion, and from it, politics, ever since. Rarely has institutional Christianity been on the side of freedom.
So, the doctrine of Creation expressed humanity’s utter dependence on God and therefore His holy institutions on earth. The original one was the Persian Shahanshah—king of kings—God’s earthly regent and the original messiah of the Jews. After the collapse of the Persian empire, priests and parsons were free to assign the power of God to whoever they favoured—that is whoever favoured them.
Woe unto him that striveth with his maker… Shall the clay say to Him that fashioneth it, What makest thou?Isaiah 45:9
Whatever God did was not to be questioned by a lump of animated clay. This is the diametric opposite of the Greek sense of inquiry, but it is the very attitude of modern Christians.
Will ye command me regarding the work of my hands? I have made the earth and created man upon it. I, even my hands, have stretched out the heavens and all their host have I commanded.Isaiah 45:9
This is demonstrably a paraphrase of passages in Zoroaster’s Gathas. Bultmann recognizes that the Canaanite Yehouah was not a god of the world but, became one under the influence of the prophets. Perhaps he suspected that the prophets had been anachronistically set in the time of the Assyrians, when they were really from the time of their cultural protegés, the Persians.
The Persians introduced the notion of linear history—a journey in time from Creation to Eschaton. Earlier religions had seen history as an annual cycle, gods and goddesses being originally vegetation and fertility principles, participating in an annual drama of renewal or revivification. Zoroaster first expressed the idea of history as a way of distinguishing good and bad, so that the righteous could feel justified in their righteousness and the wicked, however successful in life, could be condemned to an ultimate judgement or punishment. History was therefore the theatre of the battle of Good and Evil, and required everyone to play a part on one side or the other. Good would ultimately triumph but only by good people playing a greater part than wicked people. There was no point in studying history. Acting in it was all that was important to the future outcome.
Truth and Wisdom
What happened in the Jewish scriptures is that God was elevated even above the height He occupied in Zoroastrianism. The war of Good and Evil was played down and Evil attributed to God’s punishment. This change was surely effected even in Persian times. The vassals of the Persians were being depicted as being punished for their disobedience by the Good God. God had to struggle to achieve His own purpose contrary to the rebellions of His own people. They had to realize they were being punished for what they did—to face their responsibilities for the future and act accordingly. Thus they were intimidated into doing what the ruling power wanted.
Bultmann knows the truth, or gets remarkably close to it:
The writing of history was the direct outcome of historical experience—with the Greeks, their wars of liberation against the Persians, in Israel, the victorious struggle against the Philistines and the conquest of the cities of Canaan.
Bultmann notes that both began with an interest in myth and folklore but only the Greeks evolved into the scientific study of history. Now we know that the Israelites did not conquer Canaan, and the Philistines settled or were allowed to settle by the Egyptians on the coast of Palestine and asimilated mainly peacefully with the native Semitic speaking population. The truth in the conquest myth is that it was an allegory of the settlement of Yehud by the Persian colonists in the fifth century. The Philistines and Canaanites were names given to those who opposed the Persian colonists.
The Persians were the instigators of the evolution of both cultures, directly in the case of the Jews and indirectly in the case of the Greeks. The direct influence on the Jews put God at the source of history, but for the Greeks it was the response of the people to the situations they met in the world. Both interpretations looked to the future, but the Jewish one was eschatological, God’s judgement, whereas the Greek one was didactic, to teach the practical consequences of failure of duty.
The Jewish god was invisible but could be heard. Hearing was more important than seeing, but the Jewish god was not only invisible, He could not be known. God put words into people’s ears to tell them what to do. In modern society such people would be cracking up! But in Jewish mythology such words were the “Word of God” and the only way He could be known. To know God was therefore to know His will not to know His nature. Many prophets, ancient and modern have claimed to know God’s will, and it is astonishing how easily people believe them. It has been a cause of perpetual trouble in the world.
Truth is not, in the Judaeo-Christian scheme, anything that can be proved to be true, anything that can be verified in the real world and therefore be real itself. Truth is the will of God. And who knows the will of God? Those, mainly men, who can hear God talking to them! Bultmann comes close to admitting that Patriarchal religions are the religions of the insane, yet billions of people put their trusts in one or another Patriarchal prophets. The reason they do is that the prophets inculcate in their followers a profound fear of God. For those who believe in the scriptural God, wisdom is not knowledge, experience or sagacity. It is “fear of God.”
The fear of Yehouah is the beginning of wisdom but fools despise wisdom and instruction.Prov 1:7
The fear of Yehouah is the instruction of wisdom.Prov 15:33
The prophet, Isaiah, tells the Israelites that they should fear and dread Yehouah Sebaoth (Isa 8:13), this being the Persian name of Yehouah—Yehouah of hosts. It was a natural emotion to give to subject people to keep them in order. This fear of God stems from Deuteronomy which, far from being the second law, is the original law given to the Jews by Ezra, the Persian official:
Ye shall walk after Yehouah Elohim, and fear Him and keep His commandments, and obey His voice, and ye shall serve Him and cleave unto HimDt 13:4
Jeremiah says that God put fear in the people’s hearts that they would not depart from Him and they would fear Him forever (Jer 32:39)! This fear of God was just what the Persians intended, but it would not do for Christians, even Bultmann, so he immediately tells us it is not really fear at all! That is God’s Truth! Christians were to be Moslems for this “fear” was really “submission” to God’s will and “awe” at His power. Bultmann is doubtless correct that submission and awe it was meant to be, but the inducement to submit and be obedient was fear—fear of God’s retribution. Who though would procure this retribution on God’s behalf if His Chosen did not submit? The imperial authorities of Persia acting on the instructions of the Shah. In practice, it was the Shah’s word not God’s that was law, but how was an ignorant peasant to know?
Suffering and Punishment
This God controls the world, but never directly. He controls Nature and can effect retribution that way, or He controls people like the Shah, and can effect retribution that way. He does everything at second hand and rules by fiat. He is an eastern potentate writ large—the Shah of Heaven! Misfortune and suffering are God’s punishments for disobedience, and there is no rule that He has made that He will not violate to wreak His punishments.
There is no need to try to fit suffering into an overall scheme of Nature in a sense like “one man’s meat is another man’s poison” or “what is good for some is bad for others,” as the Greeks and Stoics did. People had to bear their suffering all right but because it had been imposed by God as a punishment. Whether you were a Stoic or a Yehouist, you had to put up with it. Christians, however, through the more Persianized version of Judaism preserved by the Essenes and rejected by the Rabbis, could blame suffering on to an Evil Spirit, Satan, and could fight against Evil and not merely suffer it—unless, of course, you were a Christian designated as evil by the power faction in which case you had to suffer the consequences of your Christian brothers’ fight against the evil you represented. This they have done diligently ever since, quite contrary to the ostensible emphasis placed on love in their belief.
The Stoic was assisted in bearing the burden of life in knowing that they were a part of the whole, and each piece in the structure of the cosmos had its part to play. The suffering endured by a Stoic is an altruistic act for the benefit of the rest of life. Marcus Aurelius told Stoics they had to consider everything not just themselves. Stoicism is primarily concerned with real life, and does not shrug off the duty involved for empty supernatural promises. In the Jewish scripture, much of Wisdom (Qoheleth) is atheistic. It is closer to Stoicism than to Yehouism. Supernatural rewards are rejected in:
There is nothing better for man than that he should eat and drink, and make his soul enjoy good in his labour.Ecc 2:24
This is man’s portion, and the punishment of God elsewhere is the gift of God here! God gives Job no answer to his sufferings, though the author is apparently cynical. God’s wisdom so surpasses man’s that even God’s sadistic torture of a righteous man has a proper reason. Injustices like this are resolved in the future Eschaton, so the Jewish God can have a bit of fun at the expense of a loyal devotee, because he will be rewarded in the end!
The Hebrew God and Festivals
The message of the prophets was that God was not one of the old fertility gods, the power of fertility, but was a god with a much grander scope. The Hebrew God was their god because he had specially chosen them but was a universal god. As the god of the Hebrews, he was like the god of any Greek polis, except that the polis expressed the will of the people, whereas the Hebrew God expressed an alien will, that of the Persian kings. The deity of the Greek polis was the expression of the will of the community and therefore the guardian of it. This is democracy. The Hebrew God was never democratic and expressed no communal will even in Hasmonaean times.
The Hebrew God always looked to the history of His people—how they had been privileged but constantly reneged on the covenants they had made with Him. The trouble was the history was mainly bogus—a present of those imposing the religion to keep the people compliant. It began as an authoritarian religion, saying: “You never do as you are told, so you deserve to be punished,” and so it has remained in its various epiphanies. The Persians promised to make their colonists in Yehud rich, but the Jews had to remember it was a gift, not an ability:
And say thou not in thine heart: My power and the might of my hand hath gotten me this wealth.Dt 8:17
It was given to them by God—the Persian king, in practice. The real act of creation was the creation of the temple state by the Persians. The scriptures show throughout that the Hebrews never did anything for themselves. Whenever they did, it was wrong and failed or was punished. What succeeded was God’s work. God saved them from the Egyptians and gave them a covenant. God gave them a land that was said to have been the land of their fathers.
The native Canaanite feasts were on traditional seasonal occasions, and these occasions in the vegetation cycle were transformed into celebrations of mystical historic events. Who could have made a people do this except a powerful conqueror? The Passover was when the sun passed over the celestial equator signalling the barley harvest. It was the start of the religious year when the kind winter sun that brought the rains to fertilize the crops was crucified and the cruel summer sun that shrivelled up the crops rose into the heavens—in Persian interpretation.
In the summer heat, the harvests had to be gathered before they were scorched. The feast of Booths in the month of Tishri was probably introduced by Ezra, on the occasion when he read the law to the Jews, as a Persian custom signalling the crucifixion of the cruel sun and the coming of the first rains, the beginning of the civil year, but, in the older seasonal interpretation, celebrated the end of the harvest season. The Persian interpretations were given their present “historical” meanings when the story of Moses was invented in the third century BC. Passover was excused as a celebration of a murderous angel passing over Egypt killing innocent Egyptian kids but sparing Hebrew ones. The myth is tacked on to the older seasonal myth with crude stitches. Shavuot, the feast of Weeks, another harvest festival was excused as a celebration of God’s covenant. Booths was excused as a memorial of the time the Israelites lived in the desert in crude shelters. Yehud was created artificially and the Jewish religion was similarly artificial, though it took over older Canaanite festivals.
Jewish Sagas and Kings
Deuteronomy 26:5-9 seems to be a basic rendering of the what became the sagas of Abraham and Moses:
An Aramaean ready to perish was my father, and he went down to Egypt, and sojourned there with a few, and became there a nation, great, mighty, and populous. And the Egyptians evil entreated us, and afflicted us, and laid upon us hard bondage. And when we cried unto Yehouah the God of our fathers, Yehouah heard our voice, and looked on our affliction, and our labour, and our oppression. And Yehouah brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand, and with an outstretched arm, and with great terribleness, and with signs, and with wonders. And he hath brought us into this place, and hath given us this land, even a land that floweth with milk and honey.
Now since Aram was in the north, the area near the Euphrates river about the towns of Haran and Urfa, the Aramaean could go down into Canaan and be in Egypt, since Canaan was an Egyptian colony. Equally the great nation could have been brought out of Egypt because the Egyptians were forced to give up their Canaanite colony. God had indeed brought them into a land of milk and honey, which was their own, as soon as the Egyptians were forced to give it up. This story, in other words does not imply any Exodus, but a liberation of Canaan from Egyptian rule. This will have been the Persian propaganda put over to persuade the people that they had been slaves of the Egyptians in their own land. This basic tale was expanded in the time of the Ptolemies into the full blown Joseph and Moses sagas.
The bond of God and the nation is depicted as marriage, while disloyalty to Yehouah is depicted as fornication and adultery. Loyalty means obedience to the law. The Persians, through their propagandists, the prophets, emphasized that God could exercise His power against Israel. He was not obliged to stand up for people who refused to accept His laws. The laws were Persian laws and the implied threat was that the Persians who set up the colony could destroy it, acting for God, of course. The failings of the people constantly emphasized by the prophets and the Deuteronomistic Historian meant that the covenant had never been fulfilled except by a remnant of the people. The promise that it would be fulfilled was a future promise always. The occasion would be the End of the World. As Bultmann puts it:
The covenant is not capable of realization in actual histoty. Its realization is only conceivable in some mythical future of redemption.
Semitic people regarded their god as their real king, their king merely being their god’s approved minister on earth. This is the belief that the Persians were taking advantage of. By ensuring that the god was the sort of God that reflected the policies they professed, the Persians knew they could use religion as a politicial tool. It was not a new policy but it was put into effect particularly well.
The king, Yehouah, was acclaimed at the New Year ceremony with the cry: “Yehouah is king.” The Persian king was similarly renewed as king at the Persian New Year ceremony, in which he acted the part of God slaying the Dragon of Chaos. For both, the New Year ceremonies were not held in the middle of winter as we do, but on the occasions when the sun crosses the celestial equator, as we have seen. Ceremonial hymns praise Yehouah as god of the universe, the equivalent of Ahuramazda. But prophetic propaganda could not condone a Jewish king to act as God’s regent. There was only one king—in Susa, Persepolis or Babylon.
Any clamour for a local king was countered in the mythological history. God did not want the people to have their own king, and, when he yielded to their demands, the kings proved to be flawed. So, no one at the time when the Persians invented this propaganda could have called for a local king without appearing to deny the sacred history. The prophet, Hosea, blamed the wickedness of the people in the sacred history to the crowning of Saul at Gilgal (Hos 9:15). The glory of David and Solomon, running counter to the rest of the prophetic propaganda against kings, was mainly a later invention, probably by the Maccabees, whose purpose it served, written about a briefer Persian core, just as the Moses saga was.
God anointed His kings but “God’s anointed” was a term that came to stand for the eschatological king who would act as God’s judge at the end of the world. Thus the full realization of the temple state of Yehud came in the future. Setting up Yehud and its temple were therefore eschatological steps. The Persian colonists who took on the task were particularly holy people helping God to defeat Evil. From the outset they were given this purpose as their destiny and were called a nation of priests. They had been specially chosen and would come to consider themselves the holy people of God.
Bultmann notes that after the “exile” the nation of Israel was reconstituted as a “church”:
Israel ceased to be a nation and became a church. All the foundations of government, except the administration of justice, which remained in the hands of the priests, were managed by the foreign power. Cyrus was hailed by the Jews as the Lord’s anointed.
What nation would reconstitute itself as a church? The people of Yehud were constituted as a church because the Persians set them up as a temple state—a trouble free way of collecting taxes voluntarily.
Righteousness
Much of the litany of things absent from the scriptures are things that show it is not a natural compilation of literature. Most secular songs, poems and legends of the Levant did not find their way into the Jewish scriptures. This is literature put together with a narrow purpose in mind, and although later additions admitted some more popular genres than the original, the purpose was not forgotten. It was to denigrate the Israelites as incorrigible apostates from God. The Jews came to believe it themselves, and only in Chronicles does it seem that the Deuteronomic tone is weakening.
The rules of the religion are restrictive and negative. The assumption is that the people will not obey God and would turn to practices He would not like. The law is dominant in this religion because it expressed a law imposed, and an order imposed by the Persians. Much of the law is negative. The Decalogue tells mainly what must not be done. By accepting these restrictions, people could be considered “righteous” by their fellows, and that would please God. Greek concepts like Virtue and Duty are mainly absent because the prime concern of the legislators was obedience and order. Righteousness served to encompass qualities encouraged by the Greeks like Virtue and Duty.
Bultmann rather over eggs his own pudding in seeing nothing in the Jewish scriptures comparable with qualities admired by the Greeks. It seems that he cannot recognize them if they are not as they ought to be in a Greek work, but this is not a Greek work, and what was written after Alexander was written consciously aware of its differences from Greek forms and expressions. There was a battle going on between modernizers and traditionalists, and so far as the sacred writings were concerned, the traditionalists predominated. Whatever additions were made in Hellenistic times tend to conform with tradition, and that was what had already been laid down by the Deuteronomists.
Of course, it is impossible to stop time, and evenually the Greek books were considered sufficiently holy to be admitted to the Jewish scripture, but, by then the bulk of scripture had been stabilized. This is about the end of the second century BC. The two main periods of Hellenistic revision will have been under the third century Ptolemies, and then after the victory of the Maccabees. Whatever obvious Greek influence was introduced in Ptolemaic times will have been edited out by the Maccabaean editors, but by then there was no stopping the admission of new Hellenized books like Ben Sirach.
The prophets who were propagating the Persian innovations had God disapproving of the feasts of the fertility gods of Canaan, and demanding instead “righteousness”—obedience to God’s law. The cultic practices that they seemed to rail against did not stop. Sacrificing, burning offerings and burning incenses continued, so cannot have been seen as a problem. The point was all of this was vanity unless the people were righteous! The animals brought as offerings had to be perfect, unblemished, and the worshippers were told it stood for their own righteousness. They too had to be perfect. The criterion of perfection and righteousness was obedience to the law! Not to obey them was sin. Bultmann said:
All particular transgressions are expressions of the same underlying spirit, man’s rebellion against lawfully constituted authority, his desire to be his own master. It is a rebellion against God.
Here is a Greek concept clearly enough, that Bultmann did not notice—hubris.
Law
Scribes were a combination of lawyer and theologian because the Persians had made obedience of the law into an act of piety before God. Thus religion and morality were combined in jurisprudence, and civil and criminal law were considered to be divine. One trouble was that the law as prescribed by the Persians and modified by the Ptolemies and perhaps the Maccabees was fixed as God’s law. As circumstances changed and some laws became obsolete, the people were still obliged by the scribes to obey them!
The other side of this coin was that new circumstances that had arisen went unregulated by law. It meant that schools of interpretation arose in which the new circumstances were interpreted in terms of outmoded law. These schools effectively became the equivalent of political parties, as the Python team show excellently in Life of Brian, and the Sadducees and Pharisees were the main two. Any interpretations were set down as equals. No one had the thought of testing them to see which was true, or practicable, because it was God’s law and God was not to be tested. The result was the growth of vast volumes of commentary and interpretation, all pointless. Teaching was taught by rote learning, the teacher pointing out the various opinions that were relevant in each lesson.
The motive of ethics was obedience. The law was given as commandments, and commandments had to be obeyed.
The Holy one says: I have prescribed a statute for you, I have issued a decree for you. You have no right to transgress my decree, for it is written: This is the statute of my law.Johanan ben Zaccai
Johanan ben Zaccai said men were made to practice the law! Enforcement was fear. Jews had to fear God. There is no escaping this plain fact even though the Rabbis try to tell us fear was really love of God. Failure to obey a command required a punishment. It was called divine retribution. Some sinners seemed to do very well in life but it was only an earthly illusion. They would suffer divine retribution after death. Meanwhile the righteous suffered in this life to be rewarded in the next. What more effective scam—sorry—scheme could have been invented?
In Judaism, the loss of Persia and the changed circumstances under the Greeks meant that many of the precepts had become unintelligible or seemed trivial. They no longer served the purpose for which they were written. Obedience of them became a religious formalism serving to distinguish the pious from the impious.
When the law had no provision for a circumstance, people were free to decide for themselves what to do. Righteous people knew from Zoroastrianism that good deeds made up for deficiencies of observance of the law. A final judgement and suitable punishment was expected for evil deeds while good deeds could make up for bad deeds. Good and bad deeds were weighed in the balance at the end, an idea that ignorant Christians got rid of. Rabbi Hillel saw a skull floating down a river and observed:
Because they drowned thee, thou art drowned, but they that drowned thee shall themselves be drowned at the last.
People were never sure that they had been good enough for salvation. Pious people felt uneasy and guilty, and ben Zaccai wept on his sick bed, unsure that he had been righteous enough if he should die. Penitential prayers, in which God’s forgiveness was implored were constantly on the lips of the devout. “Forgive us for we have sinned!” Repentance became a way of life, apparently meritorious in itself. Some modern Christians are the same.
Jesus
Jesus proclaimed nothing new. He was not a Christian but a devout Jew, albeit certainly an Essene rather than a Pharisee or Sadducee. The Christian gospels are explicit that Jesus had no intention of criticizing the Jewish law. Whatever there is in the mythology of Jesus that is interpreted as being abrogation of the law was introduced by those who did not care for it and wanted shot of it as an unnecessary burden—the gentile bishops! Jesus taught obedience to God, and the law was God’s law, not a jot or tittle of which could be altered.
The source of apparent differences with Judaism were:
- He was an Essene not a Pharisee.
- Even Pharisaism was not then what Rabbinic Judaism became.
- Jesus was expecting the imminent End of the World, which meant that the most important thing was to save sinners.
Bultmann tries to maintain that Jesus introduced the idea of inner motivation, but he must know that Jeremiah was the originator of it. Jesus restates that people are abject slaves before God. They can make no demands of God, but must dedicate their whole person to Him. It sounds just what the Persians wanted to inculcate almost 500 years before, when they started Judaism. It seems no coincidence that the Essenes, from the Dead Sea Scrolls, still strongly adhered to the Persian norms of the religion, unlike the pragmatic Pharisees and the Hellenistic Sadducees. But Bultmann misunderstands Jesus’s motivation, as all Christians who ignore his apocalypticism do. Jesus was expecting the world to end, of that there is no doubt.
Life is entirely a vital conception not one dependent on a spiritual background or framework. Bultmann denies that the scriptural view of the soul is opposed to the flesh. Man is indifferently called flesh or soul in the scriptures. So, the scriptural soul does not belong intrinsically to a higher plane, but is the energy whch gives life to the flesh. It resides in the blood or in the breath. Soul was, then, just a synonym for life. Yet, the sinner is punished with a premature death and it could not merely be ordinary death. Bultmann says:
Palestinian Judaism… adopted the Iranian conception of the resurrection of the body.
Here are distinctions that are not easily understood at this distance, but it seems that the belief in resurrection was that physical death was not really death. Death was what God had ordained for sinners. But if there were no higher planes, restored life was in this world not in some other. The righteous must therefore have been resurrected into life again—in this world! The difference was this world had become the “World to Come”, a world identical to this one except free of sin and corruption. The world, in Zoroastrian terms, was returned to its original state of perfection when it was first made by God. This was the kingdom of God that Jesus was expecting.
Bultmann says that Jesus was opposed to the idea of trying to accumulate merit through good works, making all reward the gift of God. He cites the parable of the labourer who laboured only for the last hour but had the same reward for his endeavours as those who had laboured all day. Jesus is not laying down any principle of worldly remuneration, or saying that God is arbitrary. His clear point is eschatological. Those who have had a lifetime of righteousness can receive no greater reward than those who have repented just in time to be forgiven and baptized. The reward is to enter God’s kingdom.
God is not capricious. Only righteous people can be thus rewarded—not crooks, confidence tricksters, liars or clergymen. Righteous people only, but so long as they are righteous, they can expect to enter the kingdom. It might be God’s own gift, but God is just, and rewards goodness, not the opposite. Certainly, the point of the parable is that sinners can be saved, but not as long as they are sinners. Christians have always fooled themselves into thinking that sinners were welcomed with open arms and pints of wine by Jesus. He accepted only those who had repented. Repentance had to be sincere and followed by righteous living until the kingdom came. Jesus repeatedly warned that the least backsliding could mean the gates of heaven could be slammed in the face of the backslider. The man who laboured only at the end of the day was a penitent Jew, the very people that Jesus thought he was sent to save. The gospels have the same parable in different forms, the lost sheep and the widow’s missing coin being two.
Many of the apparently non-Jewish teachings of Jesus have turned out to be Jewish all right but Essenic, not Rabbinic. Besides that, the Rabbis purged apocalyptic from Judaism, except in a mystic expectation of a world to come. Few commentators of today seem to realize that Judaism of the time of Jesus was not the Judaism of the modern synagogue. Humility, poverty and meekness were Essene characteristics, not generally Jewish. Most Jews thought wealth showed God’s favour, but Jesus certainly thought the precise opposite, in numerous passages utterly ignored by every modern Christian.
Much of the Essenic criticism of the Pharisees was that they were compliant with the Romans over the occupation. They followed the commandments of men not God. They did not agree with the Roman occupation, but consented to it as a practical matter. To Essenes, like Jesus, it was a major violation of the Persian law to accept that anyone other than God ruled Judah. Even in the original gospels, the Christian evangelists had set up legal straw dolls to prove that Jesus was abrogating the law when he was not. Mainly they were practical measures for people unable to practice the law fully in their constrained positions.
The Jews had more than once been slaughtered by enemies taking advantage of the sabbath restrictions. Pious Jews would rather die than work by lifting a sword on the sabbath. Jesus taught that God did not expect every detail of the law to be observed when it was not possible, because people were forced by their enemies to bear arms or eat from impure vessels, or flee on the sabbath. His message was that God knew of the purity in the heart, so in peculiar circumstances the law need not be closely observed. He was not abrogating it.
Nor was Jesus ever “a glutton and a winebibber.” Introducing this was an attempt by the evangelists to cover up the truth that Jesus frequently offered penitents the messianic meal of bread and wine. This was the Essene holy meal and was the same as the Christian eucharist, but the Christians had to make out that Jesus had started it in commemoration of himself. It meant that the other instances just became feasts, making Jesus appear a glutton and a winebibber. The feeding miracles were large scale examples of the same phenomenon, but the wine has been deliberately dropped out. It was, in any case, water, not wine.
Loving your neighbour did not mean loving the Roman occupiers, although that was quickly a convenient interpretation for gentile Christians. Jews were neighbours of the Jews. Even Samaritans were, but not Greeks and Romans.
Bultmann says Jesus has no easy recipes for salvation such as appear in the Jewish scriptures, but this is incredible nonsense. Jesus taught the same as John the Baptist—repent! Those who repented and were baptized were saved. Sure, they had to be sincere, but few Christians know what sincerity means, so they felt secure that baptism was sufficient.
People should fear God because He could destroy the soul. Jesus was certain that Judgement would come upon his generation, meaning that the world would end. Bultmann concludes:
Jesus’s teaching of God was no different from that which he had been taught.
Bultmann admits that the hope of Israel was nationalistic in character and that a series of messianic pretenders appeared between the time of the death of Herod and the Jewish War. Jesus was not, of course, one of them, even for Bultmann.
For more on the foundation of Judaism by the Persians, see the Judaism pages.
